Warning! Self-replicating Land Scanner on many sims!

Yes, its not really affecting day to day SL, Pete Fats has assisted Linden Labs with his scripting that pushes the full extent of LSL. Most of the the time for good of SL, but I think he is still famous for his "When ants go beserk " whoops.

So "when satellites go beserk" is better?

How about "when volcanoes erupt" and generate 10s of 1000s of emails to Andrew?

These things travel a set path from a source to a destination. Not sure how many per sim but there are at least 1 per Sim traveling a set path from a source(s) every 45 secs. Not sure if there is a 'mothership' or several but they seem to main travel eastward (at least from where I live. I bet if I looked long enough I could find one or more sources simply by tracing them backwards like I have been doing and quite successfully I might add.

Look at the map/grid. Now think if you had objects travelling from a source to a set destination (with routine stops in between) where would there be congestion? Well it would be where the Sim bottlenecks occur. These bottlenecks are places where there is only 1 or 2 choices of how to travel to get somewhere. Last night I discovered one of those bottle necks in Ainu along the east side. Today to test my theory I picked another sim passage bottleneck, the Butsu/Shaka area. And sure enough if you go to Batsu (252,18,400) you will find 20+ of these things stopping there briefly only to continue their journey eastward. And Im pretty sure each one has a set and unique path because when they reach a bottleneck they are not all sitting on top of each other, they are slightly spread out.

Im debating whether or not to continue tracing them back to their source. It would be cool to find the 'mothership' and see 200+ of these things spit out all at once. I wish there was someway to include beacon lines in screenshots.

print screen.

I found 4 of the motherships in one area! Screenshot coming!

Come to Paikea (4, 11, 3) and see these things. These satalites launch from here (BASF land).

As posted by Robin Linden:


Bottomline is, you people can be such drama queens sometimes
SL is all about freedom. There is nothing inherently wrong about making a global self replicating script that lasts about a second, does not take up your prim allocation and seems to have zero impact on your SL experience.
If you need a controlled environment, get a private island, or move to a more restrictive world like There, or something. You should not expect full control over what goes on with your litle parcel.
Or, should I say, Linden Lab's server that you just happen to be renting.
Because it IS Linden Lab's server, and not yours, and it's up to them to judge whether or not someone
Go rez whatever you want on my plot in Afton. See if I care.
FWIW, I asked Pete what those scripts were, and he told me he was gathering some statistics.
Maybe he wants to do something like these:

http://www.geocities.com/goreldin/Cartifex/
http://slmaps.com/dategrid2.php?css=grid.css&date=2005-03-12
http://maps.secondserver.net/

Even IF it is scanning for public land, well, there's nothing inherently wrong with scanning for public land.
Nothing new about it either. Waay back in beta, when I was a noob, someone told me about people going around with a "harvester" script that detected public objects.
Before auto-return and prim limits and all that crap, it used to be that people's objects "decayed" to public, if left on public land - something that could be found literally everywhere back then. If someone left SL, all their land was released, and all their builds would decay to public.
You could get like $4 per prim by deleting them, and hunting for public objects was a common pastime... except no one cared about it...
You could also claim them at a cost of $6 per prim, and take them for your own use. Their owner would show as public, I think, and sensing for it returned NULL_KEY...

I still have some objects I claimed back in the day. Does that make me evil?

we also used to be able to take anything left on our land for our very own. wasn't that fun!

Eggy, what you quoted contains not only false and misguiding, but utterly ridiculous data.

1: They last for sure more than 10 seconds, i have been able to track them and abuse report them, you cant do that in 1 second.
2: The hit on sim performance is for sure more than "little" even only the fact that they are in big numbers and they continuously rez DOES affect sim performance in a noticeable way. Denying this meaning knoing nothing about how LSL commands affect sim performance.

SL is about freedom? Maybe, but with freedom comes responsibility.

Another attorney of the devil... so utterly pathetic...

Hell yeah
It's proven useful too!
Christopher Omega once made a pet for himself, called Glitch.
Way back in 1.0, he was at the Disco with me, and had to teleport somewhere... which left Glitch behind. I took it, and re-rezzed a copy of it, so he never noticed =)
The other day he walks up to me saying he cant find Glitch in his inventory anymore... so I hand him a copy! He was very happy

Well, that certianly clears that up.

Hey Eggy,

Dont you feel that Pete is bringing alot of this 'drama' as you call it upon himself? Everything about them is so secretive. They are small, invisible and travel everywhere. Dont you think he could have them simply dispense a notecard when touched to explain the purpose of them? Sure you can argue freedom to do this or script that but he (esp since he's intelligent) should have seen this coming and appearently this isnt the first time. Funny thing is there is a notecard in the 'motherships' created by Char Linden. Wonder what that was about?

Any scripter wanna write me a satilite system to scan for land everywhere on the grid every 45 secs?

THESE particular satelites are secretive and sneaky. You can't make something that small without torturing and dimpling -- the author did some work to try to hide these things.

That could be characterized as "being considerate" by trying not to bother people. What they don't know won't hurt them. That's not how people are taking it though.

I think people would be a lot more accepting if they were little 1/2 meter rockets that gave you a notecard when you touch them explaining what they are doing.

Your neighbor's "online indicator" might be chewing up more simtime, and big ugly particle spewing sparklers and smoke belchers are a lot more annoying. People use up simtime with fish that swim around 24/7. So these lagbots are not the worst thing around.

Buster

Eggy, this isn't like you. You are blindly defending behavior, using sheer speculations on motives that are in fact false, and using red herring technique to try and steer the discussion into an area it's not.

No. We shouldn't be expected to shell out $1000 and $200/month for this. Rediculous.


Yeah, yeah. And it's only a game, right? Tired of hearing this tired argument.


So you're saying if 50 people rezzed something "barely noticeable" continuously and brought Afton to a crawl, you'd have no problem?


OR maybe he's gathering land owner "statistics" as already discovered because Linden Lab stated so. This is silly, Eggy, and you know it. Why are you suggesting some noble cause when we already know it's not?

I may also add that Adam's mapping satellites that he does mapping with are completely voluntary - he asks landowners to volunteer to put his device on the land and lets them know exactly what it will do. It's also temporary, does not keep rezzing stuff, and is totally unlike these stealth land scanners.

Differences:
- Permission asked of landowners
- Landowners can return them
- Visible
- Temporary fixture rather than constant
- No rezzing, no constant flow of new objects
- Announced to the public
- Serves the public interest, not just one person's pockets.

Which just goes to show that not only is Adam a more talented scripter, but he also is much more savvy on communication and cooperation with other human beings.


For the millionth time, Eggy, this isn't about scanning land. Scanning land is a red herring to this argument.

This is about littering sims with stealth objects. Why is Pete allowed to litter when clearly if lots of people did this, it'd grind SL to a halt?

I IM'd Pete and asked him to exclude my land with his objects. (I encourage all ppl. to do this.)

So far, no reply, and maybe the lb object doesn't have an exclude list yet... But if he only gets on SL casually, can I expect him to honor my request in a reasonable amount of time?

seems like screaming about this when nobody in the thread knows what the scripts are doing (and the Lindens have already said these aren't hurting anything) is being blind. just alot of assumptions that it must be evil cause they're "stealthy" or whatever. one person's "stealthy" is another person's keeping out of everybody's way so you aren't a bother. and i'm not sure where the idea that people have to explain every little thing they're doing or else they have something to hide came from. that doesn't fly if you think about it for more than 5 seconds. if you think they should have to explain because this is so invasive and sim destroying well....look again at what the Lindens said about it. they don't mind so why do you?

as far as Eggy being "so utterly pathetic"..... what's utterly pathetic is getting so worked up over something that 1) you got no clue what it is and 2) the Lindens said it has no sim impact. some people just like being upset.

temp on rez. anyways the categorical imperative only applies if everybody does do it.

Zuzi. as you can notice reading the thread we have more than a few clues.
Moreover it's not "the lindens" that say it, just customer support, that probably is composed by people that know very little about LSL. I had conversations with lindens that think exactly the opposite.

I sat on a perch at 400m over my land in Mallard, using my trusty Scan-Foo. There were as many as 5 of these stealth satellites in range at any one time. They last a lot longer than 1 second, as I've observed them for much longer before they scoot away or just disappear outright, so the statement that they only last about a second is just plain wrong. How long does a temp on rez object last, anyway?

Annah, what are the motherships called? I'd like to be able to track them down and find out where they are located in my area.

I've an ancdotal report from a beta member who had contacted Pete Fats requesting removal from his home sim back when we had the first go-round with the "lb v2" scanners. Pete Fats did remove the "lb v2" scanners from the sim.

As of today, they are back in that sim. From this I conclude either:

1. Pete Fats does not hold to his agreements
   
2. Pete Fats has no control over his scanners
   

I think IMing Pete Fats is a waste of time.

I decided to scan for these objects and found 5 of them in a relatively small area using the ScanFoo. Since the Scan Foo doesn't have that wide of a search range, I only found these 5 and am not sure if more exist in the sim. After putting away the ScanFoo, I decided to watch the sim's performance and noticed that the scanners do have an effect on the performance and cause a relative amount of lag. I was the only one in the sim at the time and watched for about 5 minutes the decrease of the sim's performance when one of these would pass by.

I abuse reported one (after being able to catch it) and sent an IM to Pete about the situation and to please exclude Gualala in his sim scanning list. While many claim that these scanners shouldn't have a big effect on the sim's performance, think about how it can effect when there are many of them (not one) with constant running scripts. To someone who enjoys being in their land and creating, this lag can have an effect in their level of enjoyment of the game.

I find this kind of attittude of disregard for other people's second lives very disappointing and disrespectful. Not because these items are land scanners, but because of the way that the owner has not bothered to talk to the owners of the lands that he is using for this experiment/research and the resources that are being used.

Ya know.

If Joe Q. Randomnewbie did this, there wouldn't be the scores of people comming out to defend him, I have a feeling.

I'm seeing people stick up for Pete as a person.

I'm seeing considerably less stick up for his actions.

I am writing a script at this time, if an object is rezzed on my land, it will send the owner a friendly reminder.

It reminds me when some murder gets arrested and they interview the 90 years old neightbor: "ooooh but it seemed SUCH a nice boy... he even used to help me cross the street..."

I have looked at several sims today, I have yet to find a sim without these things.

Need your sim examined? I will be happy to generate a report.